Henrik Samuelsson

Born 1960

Lives and works in Stockolm


The Nation's Memory is a new series of paintings. As with his previous work, the artist constructs a reality, which plays simultaneously with interior and extieror, light and darkness.


« I have been working with a specific place, The Old National Archives of Sweden. I think of the National Archives as an aspect of the common memory ; a house that gives an actual body to our common history. Since the actual archives were closed down in the late sixties, this can also be seen as a place for these lost memorys. The characters and things that enter this scene and the events that take place in these rooms represent, in some sense, the individual experience.
This work might seem like a work of deconstruction but I prefer to think of it more as a slow and poetic blasting of a common memory. » HS



Henrik Samuelsson, Silent Inventions and the Sound of Distant Chainsaws, 180 x 270 cm, 2008.